


Come Dancing

by Sholio



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: Dancing, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Families of Choice, Fix-It, Gen, Parent-Child Relationship, Post-Movie: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-27
Updated: 2017-07-27
Packaged: 2018-12-07 14:11:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11625219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: There's more than one way to sayI love you,and sometimes it works a lot better without words.





	Come Dancing

**Author's Note:**

> For this Tumblr prompt: _There was that one time they both got incredibly drunk and Peter forced Yondu to dance with him._ [Also posted on Tumblr.](https://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/163475471503/there-was-that-one-time-they-both-got-incredibly)

It wasn't a sound or any other clue that drew Peter to that corner of the ship; it was really just instinct that he followed down to the very back of the Quadrant's truncated cargo hold, and here he found Yondu, sitting with his back against the wall and a bottle of something high-proof and sharp-smelling, getting quietly and systematically drunk behind the ship's tangle of life support equipment.

Peter hesitated behind the oxygen tanks, wondering if he ought to just go away, but he might've known he'd already been spotted.

"Come in or scram, boy."

Peter came in. Yondu had a lightstick on the floor beside him, the kind that you snapped and then they burned for days with a cold blue-green glow. Otherwise it was dark back here, and cooler than the rest of the ship; it was all too easy to imagine the bitter cold vacuum of space on the other side of the walls.

There was a part of Peter that still expected to be menaced with the arrow when Yondu was in a mood like this. But of course the arrow was broken. Rocket had said he thought he could fix it, but in the meantime, there was something about Yondu that seemed smaller, somehow, without it.

"Missed you at the party," Peter said quietly, sitting down across from him with his back against the wall.

"Ain't that where you ought to be?"

Peter shrugged a little. He'd had a few drinks already, loosening up his inhibitions, which was probably what had made him go look for Yondu in the first place rather than just leaving him alone.

Music echoed down distantly from elsewhere in the ship: Earth music he _hadn't heard before._ There was a part of him that twitched desperately to go listen to it. But there would be time. Rocket had uploaded the contents of the Zune into the Quadrant's computers. The real thing was tucked safe in Peter's pocket.

He had all the time in the world to go through every single song.

Yondu took another long gulp from the bottle. It looked like it was still about half full, but then Peter noticed another, empty bottle next to him, half hidden in the shadow of his long coat.

"You gonna share, or keep it all to yourself?"

Yondu gave him a look, then handed the bottle over. His hand shook a little, from drunkenness or something else, Peter couldn't tell. 

In the chill blue-green light, it was harder to see the gray, peeling patches on Yondu's fingertips and the exposed parts of his face (chin, nose, ears) -- healing frostbite, the only visible, lingering signs of those endlessly long moments in space before Kraglin and Rocket pulled them in.

The only signs on the outside, anyway.

Peter took a gulp from the bottle before he could change his mind, gagged, and handed it back. His eyes were watering. "Gah. I forgot how lousy your taste in booze is."

This got a slight grin, a flash of jagged teeth in the half-dark. "I'm the one what taught you to drink, boy."

Peter shuddered at the memory of hangovers past. "Don't remind me. Just want to make sure we don't end up dragging you to the medbay for alcohol poisoning."

Yondu's smile was brief and twisted before he tilted back the bottle again.

Intuition -- and long experience with Yondu -- told Peter not to ask why Yondu was down here instead of up at the "holy shit we're not dead" party currently going on elsewhere on the Quadrant. In a way, while he hadn't _precisely_ been dealing with the urge to hide in a corner himself, he was finding the cool quiet of the cargo bay a relief. Finding out that your dad was a megalomaniac who'd murdered all your siblings and tried to kill you didn't exactly set you up for a party kind of mood.

And Kraglin had let him know just enough of what had gone down on the _Eclector_ that he was also really, seriously trying not to think about that, either. He'd been slowly severing ties with the Ravagers since long before he actually walked away, hadn't even liked half those guys, but it had still been his home for more than half his life. 

And it had been Yondu's whole world for longer than Peter had been alive.

From some things Rocket had said, Peter got the impression that there was even more to it than the mutiny and subsequent destruction of the _Eclector,_ things that went all the way back into Yondu's past, and he just didn't know --

 _\-- what you were thinking, you asshole, staying on an exploding planet,_ he wanted to say, and _My life's not worth more than yours, you shithead,_ but that got all tangled up with a messy ball of twenty-five years of things he'd never said, never even realized had gone unsaid, and _that_ got tangled up with the part of him that actually _did_ understand, because there had been a moment when he'd been fully prepared to stay there on Ego's crumbling planet until he died, too, and it hadn't seemed like the worst of all possible options.

Yondu wordlessly held out the bottle. Peter took it for another eye-watering swig of rotgut and handed it back.

This was turning into the worst "we're not dead" party ever. 

Peter sat up straighter and took the Zune out of his pocket. He also got out the little gadget Rocket had cobbled together in about five minutes from leftover pieces of tech dug out of his bag, because everybody had wanted to listen to it, before they got the bright idea of uploading it into the ship's memory banks.

Yondu glanced up. "Whaddya doin'?"

"Wondering if you ever listened to any of these songs," Peter said, flipping through the song list. Every one was a tantalizing mystery and an undiscovered secret. It was maybe the coolest present anyone had ever given him, and that blue asshole sitting across from him had just stuck it in his hand and then slunk off like it was nothing.

"Came with all the songs already on there," Yondu said dismissively. "Why would I?"

"So you didn't listen to any of these, at all."

A shrug, which was tacitly as good as a "well, maybe," but didn't answer his real question, which was _"And did you like any of them, jerk?"_

Well, if Yondu wasn't going to tell him, he'd just have to pick. _Come Dancing,_ this one was called, by a band called The Kinks. That sounded promising. Peter stuck it into the little docking speaker Rocket had made, and when the first beats sounded, he grinned. Yeah, this was something you could dance to.

"What the hell you doin', boy," Yondu sighed with the long-suffering attitude of someone who'd been dealing with this shit for _way_ too many years, as Peter got up and tried some experimental steps to the music.

"Showing you how Terrans dance," Peter said. "C'mon. You know you wanna try it."

"You ain't been on Terra since you was too short to see over my steering console, so how do you know how Terrans dance? Think I'll stay here an' watch _you_ make a fool of yourself."

Peter got the rhythm of it, settling into the beat that made him want to twirl, so he did, and he caught Yondu grinning, just a little, before burying that quick, sly grin in another drink from the bottle.

"Nobody's watching," Peter said, doing a complicated little sidestep that a Krylorian girlfriend had taught him from one of the country dances of her homeworld. There wasn't much room in here, but he'd danced in tight spaces all over the _Eclector_ and the _Milano_ , so he was pretty good at it. "It's just us."

"That ain't better."

"Look, when I came down from upstairs, we'd managed to teach Mantis to dance, and she was teaching Drax, of all people, and if _that's_ possible, then why the hell not?"

"You ain't dancin', you're just movin' around to music."

"What d'you think dancing _is?_ Dance-off, man. You and me, let's go."

Yondu gave him a narrow-eyed look that was usually a precursor to the arrow coming out, and then heaved himself to his feet with a certain amount of effort, holding onto the wall. He really was drunk, a lot more than Peter had realized -- Yondu never gave anything away; he wasn't slurring in the slightest.

He was also perfectly graceful -- deliberate, slow, but not at all clumsy -- as he executed what Peter thought at first was a copy of his own little spin-sidestep, long coat sweeping out around him ... and then realized was something else, something that looked like a stylized piece of formal dancing (completely alien to Peter) that the music happened to fit the beat of. "That, huh?"

"Well, ideally you'd do it more than once," Peter said, trying not to grin like a lunatic, and not really succeeding. The Kinks song segued into another fast one -- thank the gods; he really didn't want to try to teach Yondu to slow-dance -- and he picked up the new beat with quick jump steps, twisting his arms, shoulders -- "You just let the music get into you. Let it move you."

"Earth ain't the only planet has dancin', you know," Yondu grumbled, swaying halfheartedly to the music. "I know what it _is._ An' you ever tell anyone about this, I'll --"

"Kill me, yes, I know. I've been hearing that from people a lot lately." Peter gestured at Yondu's feet. "What's that one you did before? Show me."

Two songs and another quarter of the bottle later, Peter had learned a few steps of what he guessed was some kind of half-remembered Centaurian dance, and _he'd_ managed to teach Yondu to moonwalk, which Peter decided he was going to consider his greatest achievement in life. And Yondu was grinning, really grinning, and Peter couldn't stop laughing as he tried to remember the steps of the Krylorian dance that his old girlfriend had shown him, and got his feet tangled up instead.

And the planet that had been his father, and the ship that had been their home, were nothing more than smoking pieces of wreckage in the blackness of space, but ...

But he _had_ a father, and they both had something like a home, and it was, just maybe, going to be okay.


End file.
